Parerga and paralipomena pdf

Arthur Schopenhauer’s major works in ethics, in which he argues that morality stems from compassion. Arthur Schopenhauer parerga and paralipomena pdf On the Basis of Morality as a response to a question posed by the Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies in 1837 for an essay contest. Nor should it go unmentioned that several distinguished philosophers of recent times are mentioned in such an indecent fashion as to provoke just and grave offence”.

In response Schopenhauer, outraged, says that “These ‘distinguished philosophers’ are in fact — Fichte and Hegel! On a copy of his Two Essays, on the title, Schopenhauer wrote that the judge of the essay in Copenhagen had been a Hegelian academic, author of a Hegelian theory of morals and later a bishop, making it very improbable that he would have been awarded a prize. On the Basis of Morality is divided into four sections. The first section is an introduction in which Schopenhauer provides his account of the question posed by the Royal Danish Society and his interpretation of the history of western ethics. In the second section, Schopenhauer embarks on a criticism of Kantian ethics, which he viewed as the orthodoxy in ethics. Religions have promised a reward after death if a person behaved well.

Governmental laws are motives for good behavior because they promise earthly rewards and punishments. Kant’s Categorical imperative claimed that a person’s own behavior should be in accordance with a universal law. Schopenhauer declared that the true basis of morality is compassion or sympathy. The morality of an action can be judged in accordance with Kant’s distinction of treating a person as an end not as a mere means. By drawing the distinction between egoism and unselfishness, Kant correctly described the criterion of morality. The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, translated and edited by Christopher Janaway, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer, 2009. If Kant’s Categorical Imperative is universally valid, applying to all persons, then it also applies to the person who is acting in accordance with it.

Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on the morality of pity by D. Cartwright, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1984. Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals”. Full text online at the Internet Archive, trans.